


Kyrie

by Issay



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Concentration Camps, Fic for Victory 2k15, M/M, Minor Character Death, character centric, headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-08
Updated: 2015-05-08
Packaged: 2018-03-29 14:09:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3899200
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Issay/pseuds/Issay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of Lew's first memories is a deer his grandfather shot and then flayed in the backyard. It wasn't the blood on a green, green grass or the once majestic, now dead and unnaturally still body that made a strong impression on a five year old Lewis Nixon – it was the odor of death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kyrie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lastinthebox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lastinthebox/gifts).



> Hello!  
> lastinthebox's prompt: Nixon/Winters, gen, or any pairing. It's common knowledge Nixon never fired a shot during the war. This is not the truth.  
> I hope you won't be disappointed :)  
> Also, this is a work of fiction, based on the show “Band of Brothers” and characters portrayed by actors – not real people. Author means no disrespect.

Austria is so beautiful this time of year. Sun is shining, skies are blue, war in Europe is pretty much over, if you don't count the cleaning, rebuilding and dragging the bastards to courts and in front of execution squads. Easy's out in the clear open air, being ran into the ground by the diabolic duo of Speirs and Lipton, both determined to prepare the boys the best they can before the company's deployed again. Nix watches them run PT and smiles softly, thinking of two very young boys running three miles up and three miles down. God, it feels like centuries have passed since those sunny days filled with Currahee and hating Sobel. Now Lew thinks that maybe old Sobel wasn't the worst company commander in the world but is still glad that he wasn't the guy in charge in Normandy or Bastogne. That would be a fucking disaster.

“Damn, you still have that gun? Thought you lost it in Belgium,” says Harry, passing Nix while running down the stairs. He's probably going to the post office, thinks Lew, to send another letter to Kitty. Poor girl has to have a really big box of correspondence by now.

“Nah, still have it,” he answers. “Thought better to clean it, you know. War's almost over, who knows? Maybe the bastards will again start paying attention to grooming standards.”

Harry stops on the stairs and bursts out laughing.

“Better hide the whiskey then, Lew. And clean that gun good, maybe they won't notice you never got to use it.”

And then he's gone, disappearing somewhere in the flood of warm, bright sunlight. Nixon looks down, at the Browning P35 in his hands and sighs softly. Yes, they really believe that he has never fired a gun in the field. Always on the sidelines, always safe behind the line.

How wrong they are.

*

Lewis Nixon never was a coward. That is, of course, if you can be courageous and at the same time hate violence.

It's just that he comes from a long line of strong, strict men who love money, hunting, bleeding and all things manly which means that Nixons are pretty much a family of soldiers. His father fought in Europe and came back wounded, from which he never recovered. It made impossible for him to stay in the army and have a career so, instead, Nixon Senior started a very successful company and tried to raise his son a soldier.

Some men just aren't fit to be fighting wars with rifles in their hands. Some fight them with their brains.

So did Lewis. A long and tireless war with his father for every inch of freedom he could have. War with his own hate towards his quiet, passive mother, towards his father's expectations and the world that looked at Lew and saw the men who were born long before him.

“The Nixon name has a meaning, son,” his father used to say, proudly looking at his hunting trophies hanging from the walls of the study. “Do not disrespect it.”

Which meant being a good boy and joining the army, no drinking, no smoking, no girls. Lewis sometimes thinks that his father would be delighted to have Dick Winter as his son. Hell. Who wouldn't be?

 

Lewis didn't expect Dick to become an important part of his life, not at first. Too quiet, too polite, almost passive like Lew's mother – it wasn't a good first impression, not really. But somewhere between three miles up and three miles down Lewis discovered that Dick had a sense of quite biting, ironic humor and that he was loyal to a fault. That he was a splendid judge of character who didn't wince when Lew drunk, slept around and swore – who was hell bent on becoming Nix's friend and achieved this goal before Lew knew it.

“I have honestly no idea why you're sticking around,” he said one day to the red-headed man. “Shouldn't you be friends with a chaplain or some other man of God and convictions?”

Dick laughed at that, this soft, breathless sound that was always so damn intimate.

“As shocking as it sounds, men of God and convictions are boring, Lew. And we can't have boring when we go to war, can we?”

“That we can't.” Lewis saluted with his bottle and chuckled when Dick's gaze followed a drop of alcohol on his lips.

*

Bastogne was many things but boring wasn't one of them.

Bastogne was a white, snowy hell with blood, shellacking, shaking hands and the most annoying command Lewis has ever seen. But Bastogne was also long hours spend with Dick pressed from shoulder to toe, surrounded by the smell of pine branches they used as the floor and roof of their foxhole. Bastogne was a hundred little things and sometimes Nix felt guilty every time he got to enjoy one of them because they were surrounded by half frozen to death, desperate men. He had no right to feel content. But then Dick would do one of them, like sit on the edge of the hole and break ice in order to shave – and Nix's heart would swell with fondness and affection because the action was just so perfectly Dick Winters. So he took his comforts from wherever he could. Because who would care in bloody Bastogne?

It was the fucking Bastogne he almost lost Dick.

The shellacking they took was almost too much for many men, the lack of basic human comforts and death all around them made a lot of men question why they were there – but not the men of Easy Company. If they broke, they imploded, hurting no one but themselves. Sobel would be really fucking proud.

Not all men have the moral spine of E Company.

“Kraut artillery knows precisely where we are, no matter where we move,” muttered Sink, bent over a stack of maps in Company CP. “Gentlemen, we have ourselves a traitor.”

Nixon didn't believe in the conspiracy theory – but then there's a young Kraut heading straight at Dick's foxhole and Lew thanks every divine spirit who might be listening that the kid from Dresden had a terrible sense of direction and decided to take a crap before shooting Richard Winters. Because if he didn't, if Dick hadn't heard him, if the Germans sent more men, if it wasn't so cold that morning and if the snow didn't creak…

They knew precisely where to look for battalion's commanding officer.

The loss would be unimaginable.

So Lewis took his Browning and, at Sink's request, stood in the corner of a dark basement in a half collapsed building while Army's best interrogators beat the truth out of the young Kraut. He listened to a very pale translator relay a story about a German agent in the assisting staff, one of the orderlies. He watched as the man in question was dragged down to the basement and thoroughly interrogated with rubber hoses and salt and acid burning his lips.

“Will you do the honors, sir?” asked one of the guards and Nix realized that he was the one being asked. He touched the Browning hesitantly – there should be justice, a trial, even for a scum who sold out his brothers in arms. That's what Dick would do. But Nix is not Richard Winters, he's not even half of a man Dick is, so he nods.

Lew thought of a ginger head with a bullet hole and blood on a pristine snow, he thought of a life without Dick and that the only justice they can have in this war is the one they'll deal out themselves.

He pulls the trigger.

*

One of Lew's first memories is a deer his grandfather shot and then flayed in the backyard. It wasn't the blood on a green, green grass or the once majestic, now dead and unnaturally still body that made a strong impression on a five year old Lewis Nixon – it was the odor of death: sickly sweet smell of blood and guts that made the boy run away and hide in his mother's closet that carried the scent of perfume and touch of soft, flowing garments. After that his grandpa used to say that Lewis is going to be the first of the Nixon line who won't be a soldier.

Standing in the middle of the concentration camp, Lewis wished his grandfather had been right. It would be so easy to be a merchant, to simply profit from war. Just like the crowd of Nazi profiteers who used slave labor. He knows that a few days earlier a private from Item grazed a mattress in a place he was housed in and inside found human hair used as padding. It was now becoming clearer and clearer that the hair didn't come from desperate women who sold their locks but from a place far more ominous than hairdresser's salon.

“We're going to the female camp,” said Dick standing next to Lewis, watching still smoking rubble. “We need to...try and at least...”

“Yeah,” murmured Nix, his hand clasping Winters' arm. The only comfort they could allow themselves in public, the only one that wouldn't cause anyone to raise eyebrows at men of their position and power. What pitiful creatures they were.

Lewis watches the gate of female camp, sees fragile figures of women and children, starved, dirty and desperate, and feels hate. It's the kind of loathing that makes people go mad, that creates monsters and screams into the night. For a moment he was paralyzed by his own hate and by the need to simply shoot someone, to keep shooting until there is no one else to kill. But that would make him equal to those who came up with the sick idea of killing people based on the shape of their eyelids or noses and beliefs of their ancestors. So Lewis took a deep breath and once again smelled the same sickly sweet scent as all those years ago with his grandfather and deer.

“Are you okay?” asked Dick quietly, his own face ashen and even his hair lost their color like the air and smoke around the camp sucked life out of them.

“Is anyone?” he asked back and slowly, like an old, broken man made his way to the now opened camp and a crowd in rags and dresses that once were beautiful and frilly and made Lew think of his mother. The woman in torn, gray dress sitting on a pile of rubble could be his mother. To him she looked older than she probably was, raddled by hunger and murderous labor. On her lap sat a dark haired boy, no older than five.

Without a word Lew handed her his canteen.

“Thank you,” she said with hard, heavy accent and smiled, lines on her face softening slightly as she poured few drops of water on child's chapped lips. Lew felt like he was hit in the head with something very hard, hearing those words said in exhausted but oh so grateful tone. What was she grateful for? That the heroic United States of America came to the rescue? That they went through mud and blood and snow to help her and all those doomed souls, even if they were too late to help so many others?

For fuck's sake if it wasn't for the patrol stumbling upon the male camp, they wouldn't even know it was there.

Without a word and with a heavy feeling deep in his gut, he left.

 

If the men don't stay in their assigned quarters, no one conducts a bed check. If they huddle together for comfort or warmth, no one really cares.

 

“There were documents in the female camp. And that boy from the SS they left behind, who was wounded and barricaded himself in a watchtower, hoping he'll escape? He almost pissed himself before they even started questioning him. Anyway, he talked. A lot,” said Lew, staring at the canopy of Dick's bed, heavy cloth hanging above him. “It's called Kaufering, satellite camp of Dachau. Work camp, or at least a part of one. There are others. Camps, sub-camps, concentration camps, male camps, female camps, death camps...”

“How many more, Lew?”

“I don't know. More.”

With a heavy sigh Dick rose from his chair, got rid of the shoes and switched off the light. In the darkness, Nix felt the mattress sag and a warm, long body curled around his. For a moment he had to fight an urge to take his bayonet and check if they were lying on human hair.

“I wanted to shoot somebody today,” Nix said eventually, drawing a little comfort from Dick's moist, hot breath on the back of his neck. “Anyone, really. Is this going to feel like this now? Like killing is easy?”

“Lew...”

“Yes. Yes, I know.”

His fingers found Dick's in the darkness and heavy silence over Landsberg. In his dreams, Lewis saw the snows of Bastogne and watched Dick bleed out, brain shockingly red on the pristine snow, over and over again until he woke up. He thought of lifeless eyes of the traitor he had killed and the smell of blood on cold concrete. Of a deer being flayed.

Nix waited for dawn with Dick's pulse under his lips and scent of ash filling his nose.

*

Yes, Austria is so beautiful this time of the year, the colors almost overwhelming the eyes used to gray and white. When Nix takes a deep breath, all he can smell are flowers and cakes, maybe some perfume. It's perfect. Just perfect.

His fingers tighten on the Browning and then relax again. He killed a man but he killed him during a war and to protect something, someone precious to him. And nobody knows, only Dick – even if he doesn't ask questions and doesn't know the details, he knows - and Lew trusts him implicitly and sees no accusation in his eyes. In the eyes of the world, he's the one who didn't get to fire his gun to kill a man. The one with clean hands and who still came back victorious. Even if it's a lie, it somehow makes him feel a bit better while the hot May sun chases away the last icy bites of Belgian winter.

**Author's Note:**

> Due to some historical inaccuracies in the show I feel like I should clarify something. The camp closest to Landsberg was indeed Kaufering – more precisely, Kaufering IV, in which the SS set fire to the barracks and killed the prisoners who were unable to evacuate in a death march to Dachau in late April 1945. I couldn't find any information about a female camp in the Landsberg area (even though the show stated it was there) – but I did find one in Mühldorf camp complex which is on the other side of Dachau (the “mother” camp of both as they were its satellites).  
> You can read about Kaufering [here](http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10006171)  
> [Mühldorf](http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10006172)  
> [Dachau](http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005214)  
> [ You can also take a look at Dachau's satellite camps.](http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_nm.php?ModuleId=10006172&MediaId=3851)  
> [Find me on tumblr!](http://issayscorner.tumblr.com/)


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